I strongly suspect that if they kill it off at some point we'll have solutions like archive to work around being forced into their UI - even if those solutions are forced to scrap the information out of their web presentation rather than via API calls.
> You join a startup because of the many other benefits it provides
This. So much this. The exit is the lottery ticket. It'll likely fail.
But the real lure is getting to wear a ton of hats and fly by the seat of your pants. Any engineer in a < 20 person eng team is going to have a ton of exposure to how the business works, to making real-time decisions, and just generally being impactful. _THAT's_ why you go.
(And, that said, it's definitely not for everyone)
If you value having exposure to how business works, making real-time decisions, and being impactful at > $100k a year you’re a much better employee/coworker than I’ve ever been.
The reality of the situations is working at a startup is a great opportunity to prove oneself and have stories to tell when it comes time for interviews (or drinks with colleagues).
For most employees it gives those of us without the “perfect” education/gpa/etc an opportunity to work ourselves into positions to be making significant income at larger companies either through exit, acquisition or being hired somewhere else.
Love all of these responses. I'll add mine into the ring as well.
I came in by photojournalism -> photoshop -> graphic design -> web design through the 90's.
I was never really good as a designer. I was capable, but I didn't have that "real talent" that I could see in others. Instead, I was always interested in the technical aspects of design. I enjoyed color separation and complex printing jobs.
At around the same time, I realized I was getting tired of handing my designs over to the engineers who would slop them together. So I started dabbling with Macromedia Director (predecessor to Flash for making CD-ROMS [when that was a thing]), then flash, and then HTML and kept going farther and farther back in the stack. This was in the time of PERL and ASP, and I'd devour O'Riley books trying to learn as much as I possibly could. A book on regex. A book on data structors. Learning SQL.
I then had the fantastic opportunity to work with a group of people that stuck together through a series of companies (myself as the designer). At the last company, I was incredibly fortunate to have the architect take me under his wing and have daily master/apprentice style problems and reviews with me. Today you're writing a binary logger. Tomorrow a reader. Now an HTML parser. The architect was brutal, and I'd go home sometimes in tears... until I realized it wasn't about _me_. I had to check my ego at the door, and that this could be a dialogue if I was willing to participate and not to get defensive, and be OK unlearning some bad practices (To this day, I still think he's one of the most incredible humans on the planet).
Twenty years later, it's been an excellent career. I've built a lot of cool shit, and finally even had a decent exit. I'm in management now, but I can still find some "fingers on the keyboard" time here and there.
If I can give any advice:
- Never stop learning. Never stop asking questions.
- Don't get hung up on being a particular language specialist—it's fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals... everything else is just syntax.
- Interviews are going to suck sometimes, because there's some asshole in the loop that biases towards academia and thinks you're not worth their time... but don't let it get you down (pro-tip: you probably don't want to work there anyway).
- Celebrate your journey, don't shy from it, and be proud that you're doing this on your own; because it's a damned hard road sometimes.
(also a happy syno user here, been using it on several NAS's quite happily).
My rough understanding is synology did some pretty heavy modifications to btrfs in their implementation though... (a quick google finds me nothing to back this up, but i remember reading about it somewhere...)
Not modifications per se, but it doesn't quite do the "normal" setup. Encryption is a mess (you can't export encrypted volumes via NFS), and the caching layer on top of it seems prone to corruption on the SSD (I've had my NVMe mirror cache drop twice over the last year and a half).
I'd like to see them move to full disk encryption rather then their current approach.
They do encryption/compression on subvolume level; each share you create is a separate subvolume.
For RAID5, they are using it on top of LVM, but with some modification - the synology implementation hooks LVM and btrfs together, so it gets ZFS-like properties.
So they have fixed the last big hurdle to btrfs adoption in the small (single node) NAS space and are just sitting on it (violating the GPL). I urge any Synology user to write them to send you the Linux kernel source then upload it somewhere... though, their last Linux kernel drop seems to have been in 2017, so not much hope there...
It was late '99 or early '00 when I went to work at my first "tech" startup. We'd raised 70-something million, and all the stars were aligning. We'd go to lunch and bring a calculator so we could work through "worst-case scenarios" millions of dollars were in our future. I remember passing up other job offers that also included a lease of a new BMW as part of the signing.
Of course, with the down-turn, and given that we were effectively trying to position ourselves as CRM middleware, all bets were off. The business dried up, and our burn-rate was through the roof. Word got out the day before about the upcoming layoffs. The next day there were kegs of beer that sat out in the engineering pits.
IT had a helluva time, as a lot of people walked off with their laptops and company-issued phones. The dirty secret was that there was also a complete (still shrink-wrapped) palette of brand new 2U Dell servers in the loading bay that mysteriously went missing in the CO office that day.
Like a naive babe in the woods, I survived the first 2? maybe 3? RIFs. Even as I was building a website that listed all of our hardware and furniture for sale, and unracking and packing all the servers from the colo—I still didn't get it. Reality hit like a brick.
I was lucky enough to fall in with a good group of folks who continued to follow each other to other companies either as employees or as contract work for the next few years. There were maybe one or two scary months, but overall it was manageable. (Also lesson learned: your network is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING)
Yeah I heard it sucked. I did like Cloud Atlas. But The Matrix was inspired by Ghost in the Shell so I have huge hope that they couldn't kill Ghost in the Shell like this current director did.
Though, now dated, I'd also recommend [Steve Matchett's books](http://stevematchett.com/). Previous mechanic, and now commentator (which, yeah, some people hate... but i love the guy). Interesting insider perspective.
I don't mind most of his commentary, except for the bit where he calls all the teams by their home city. People don't really care about Brackley vs. Maranello.
I've never seen Steve's commentary (although I do love his books), but those references could be useful in appreciating the lineage of the teams on track, e.g. the consideration the the team that once was Spyker finished 4th in the championship last year.
Yeah, I don't mind it occasionally, but he'll open up qualifying with something like, "Well today we're going to see if Maranello can take the fight to Brackley," and I wish he'd just use the team names.
On the other hand, I really look forward to hearing Hobbs go "Whoeuueeuuueeeoaa!!" midsentence every time someone gets even slightly sideways.
